HCII 2011-07-09 Volume 1

HCI International 2011 Keynote Speech

The dramatic success of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
blogs, and traditional discussion groups empowers individuals to become active
in local and global communities. Some enthusiasts believe that with modest
redesign, these technologies can be harnessed to support national priorities
such as healthcare/wellness, disaster response, community safety, energy
sustainability, etc. However, accomplishing these ambitious goals will require
long-term research to develop validated scientific theories and reliable,
secure, and scalable technology strategies. The enduring questions of how to
motivate participation, increase social trust, and promote collaboration remain
grand challenges even as the technology rapidly evolves. This talk invites
researchers across multiple disciplines to participate in redefining our
discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) along more social lines to
answer vital research questions while creating inspirational prototypes,
conducting innovative evaluations, and developing robust technologies. By
placing greater emphasis on social media, the HCI community could
constructively influence these historic changes.

HCI Design

This paper discusses the theoretical framework underlying the studies of
cognitive-based user interface design of heritage tourism website. Multiple
Resource Theory under cognitive psychological study is used particularly in
developing UI taxonomy of museum website. MRT highlights on three components
which are perceptual modality, visual channel and code of processing.
Components of MRT are applied extensively into user interface dimensions
identification by emphasis on user interface support functions. As a result
three components are propose; format, structure and representation. These
components can be used to provide insights into area of HCI with taxonomy of UI
for museum websites. Cognitive-based UI framework is proposed and presented
with aims to assist in the design and development of the taxonomy.

Keywords: User Interface Design; Cognitive

A Design Science Framework for Designing and Assessing User Experience

User Experience is a well recognized factor in design and evaluation of
artifacts in Human-Computer Interaction. There are many user experience models
reported in the literature to reflect this status. Techniques and instruments
for managing user experience are still not sufficient. In this paper, we
discuss design science research and important user experience models reported
in the literature and propose an integrated design science framework for
designing and assessing user experience. We also present the results of an
experimental study to validate our proposed framework and the instrument
employed.

Keywords: Design Science; User Experience

Objective and Subjective Measures of Visual Aesthetics of Website Interface
Design: The Two Sides of the Coin

The main purpose of this study is to compare objective layout-based measures
of visual aesthetics with subjective questionnaire-based measures. Correlation
analysis was used to carry out the comparison. Values for the tested objective
measures were calculated for forty-two web pages already used in a previous
study, for which subjective questionnaire scores (classical/expressive and VisA
WI) were already available. Results showed significant correlations between
many of the tested objective screen layout-based measures and subjective
questionnaire-based measures related to order and layout of the screen. These
findings suggest that the objective layout-based measures tested in this study
can be used for overall assessments of visual aesthetics of websites and
particularly for assessing aesthetic aspects related to the classical and the
simplicity dimensions of website aesthetics.

Recently, Interaction Design became popular. We found that, if we want to
improve interaction design, an interaction design education method is
indispensable. Especially, interaction design usually consists of two or more
different fields of discipline. When members with different backgrounds are
working together, there are always cause many problems, mainly during
brainstorming processes. In the final, we tried to find out the main cause of
the problem and tried to figure out a method for interaction design education.
In the end, we also propose the possible solution to improve interaction design
teaching design. We except this research can help to improve interaction design
education.

The emergence of rich application implementation frameworks, such as WPF and
Silverlight, promoted a new collaboration paradigm between developers and
designers where ownership of the user interface code is transferred to the user
experience team. The implications of this new paradigm for the user centered
design process impact its technical, collaborative, and business dimensions.
The traditional design prototype can now demonstrate most of the desired user
experience and could be directly integrated with the back-end code,
significantly reducing the design revision costs. Creating the rich prototypes
demand enhanced technical skills from visual designers, who become a member of
both the design and implementation teams. The implementation tools provided by
the rich application frameworks aim to simplify the prototype creation task for
the designer, but can potentially lead customers to expect a lower effort
associated with the user centered design process.

In the process of software development, the ease with which the user can
perform his/her tasks in the system -- commonly called usability -- is an
important requirement. The prototyping of user interfaces is one of the most
widely used techniques to specify this type of requirement. This paper presents
the importance and need to improve and increase the agility of prototyping
interfaces in agile development processes. The authors propose a software that
is able to build low-fidelity prototypes, document them and support user
testing, to aid the process of interface building in the Scrum methodology.

In the current World Wide Web, useful information on web sites is often
mixed with a lot of information that is not relevant to a user at a particular
moment, or is presented in a format that is not optimal for a particular person
using a specific artifact. In this paper we argue that to solve problems
related to information relevance, presentation and flexibility of use,
approaches are required that provide users with uniform ways of accessing and
using information and services that are relevant to them at a particular moment
in a way that suits their competences and needs. Informed by the Pragmatic Web
and hence the questions of how and why people actually access information and
services, this work proposes to set a basis for a conceptual framework to
better understand, reason about, and design interaction in the Web.

As green being a significant issue of these years, we want to discuss about
how to combine green with technology through ambient design. Not only use
intelligent methods but also interact with fun playing interaction. The
relationship between people and the feedback of installation can make people
help themselves to meet the needs of them. This paper provides an innovation
concept of ambient Intelligence. People can help themselves through a
wind-blower installation by conventional power-generating method.

Rich internet and desktop application frameworks provide advanced features
like direct object manipulation and advanced animations that can enhance the
user experience. This paper traces the history and evolution of rich
applications and in front of the background of the T.O.T.E. framework discusses
the benefits that rich application capabilities provide for the human-system
interaction.

Well-designed icons should be visually distinctive and appropriately
represent their intended meanings. Through the axiomatic design method,
potential design issues about the recognition of a set of biometric icons for a
fingerprint capture device have been identified. Two possible solutions, icon
redesign and provision of procedure instruction, were proposed. A 2x2 ANOVA
experiment was designed to test the main and interaction effects of the two
solutions on eighty participants' icon recognition rate. Results showed that
either redesigning the icons or providing the procedure instruction could
significantly enhance the icon recognition rate. Furthermore, significant
interaction effect indicated that the benefit of instruction was minor if
redesigned icons were applied. From the perspective of human factors, icon
redesign according to the axiomatic design principles may be a predominant
solution.

Designers need rapid prototyping tools that are embeddable, easily
configured and can control a large range of accessories. Current prototyping
tools fall short on these requirements by requiring one or more of the
following: a tether to a computer, textual programming, and/or limited
accessory control. To overcome the limitations of current tools, we have
developed Buttercup, a standalone embedded sensor/effector controller that
provides a high degree of customization for rapid prototyping interactive
devices. The keys to the implementation of Buttercup are its hardware and
firmware architecture. By building a system focused on sensor and effector
control, the hardware can be small and inexpensive. The firmware utilizes a
unique mapping system that lends itself to robust control over its accessories
while allowing intuitive configuration by the user through a graphical user
interface.

To improve the integration between Software Engineering (SE) and Usability
Engineering (UE) this paper identifies areas of overlap and develops proposals
for their integration. The focus is on key requirements that were derived using
semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The principles and activities in
the standards ISO 13407 and ISO/PAS 18152 were concretized to establish
specific quality aspects. The identified requirements provide a foundation for
systematic modification of existing development processes with established best
practices from both disciplines.

Wizard of Oz (WOZ) systems and WOZ experiments are an important tool for
basic and applied research in HCI. We report about using SEMAINE as a flexible
component based middleware with a loose coupling of components as software
infrastructure for WOZ experiments in human companion interaction. We focus on
our experimental WOZ designs, their realisation within the SEMAINE framework
and lessons learned from deploying the implemented solutions as the basis for
ongoing controlled experiments with 120 subjects.

With the advent of rich application frameworks like Flash and Silverlight as
well as the increased exposure to interaction models they make possible (does
anyone want a mobile device that doesn't have an iPhone-like interface?) it
isn't difficult to imagine that usability and design professionals may be
feeling a little vulnerable. After all, until recently, usability and design
professionals were the last, best hope in the face of early web design,
business systems left over from the 80s and clunky mobile phone menus. We
helped create an environment in which users expected more (at least on the
web). Today, however, developers have at their disposal an arsenal of tools
designed to provide users with experiences that take advantage of asynchronous
server calls, high-definition multimedia and slick, natural-feeling
interactions. Have we been relegated to the role of usability testing? Surely,
our profession has more to offer. The good news is that our role is the same as
it has ever been. Like any platform or technology, rich application frameworks
are the medium through which design is expressed. As such, they are no
different from any previous platform that was ready to revolutionize the manner
in which people interact with information, the world or each other. They are
the tools through which researchers, designers and technologists enable users
to complete tasks and make decisions. They are the paint and canvas, the clay
and plastic molds, with which we bring our designs to life. A well-designed
system is the result of a well-defined design process. That process includes
the expertise of an interdisciplinary team with individual backgrounds in
graphic design, fine art, architecture, cognitive psychology, anthropology,
human-computer interaction, and other fields. This kind of design team has the
training and experience to bridge the gap between business, technology and
human requirements. They (we!) practice a design process that is mindful of the
features, functions and legacy systems that must be somehow united, implemented
and maintained. They are equally mindful of who will be using these systems
(from motorcycle enthusiasts to financial analysts, from students to CEOs),
their experiences and mental models, where the systems will be used (from
hospital emergency rooms to living rooms and executive boardrooms) and what
they need from technology to improve rather than impede outcomes. If, at any
point, the user must wrestle with the interface, then research and design have
failed. Our job, therefore, remains one of understanding the ways in which
users need to have information presented to them, the ways in which they need
to interact with it and the decisions they must make. The capabilities made
available via rich internet applications provide a larger toolset from which to
choose in order to meet these requirements.

The methodology of "personas" is a well-known procedure and very often used
for characterizing target users in user-centered design projects. Very often,
personas are represented by a picture. This paper introduces a different
approach to present the results of a user analysis study with the goal to
increase assimilation and comprehension of a project's personas. We believe
that creating and developing a new concept enhancing "personas" with their
context, giving less importance to the image of the person with a silhouette
and adding an image of their main scenarios can make more impact in our
organizations. To verify our idea we conducted a study to evaluate which format
-- "personas" with a picture and "personas" with their contexts -- worked
better.

The adoption of Rich Application Technologies (RATs), such as Windows
Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Adobe Flex, not only significantly enriches
the user interface (UI) technology, but also can boost the collaborations among
user experience (UX) specialists, designers and developers. Many books and
plenty of online resources have described and discussed the technical
capability and details of various RATs. However, how to effectively incorporate
RATs into the process of UX design and development has not been systematically
addressed. In this paper, we report our experience of applying RATs to develop
several complex enterprise software systems. A new role, integrator, is
introduced to support the communications among UX specialists, designers, and
developers. We discuss the responsibilities and task assignments for each role,
and propose a new workflow to streamline the design and development. We also
discuss the challenges and the lessons learned from applying different RATs.

Model-Based and Patterns-Based Design and Development

Model-based design of user interfaces mostly starts with task and domain
modeling. The resulting models are an important input to subsequent development
steps. Thus, a thorough evaluation of these specifications is of great
importance, e.g. to avoid the implementation of bad or even error prone
solutions. Executable task models are in use for several years to evaluate the
design time specifications. They are also used at runtime by now as part of the
final application. In this paper we propose an executable task model that is
configured using the design time model. Kernel concept of this work is a task
state machine describing a generic task life cycle assigned to each task.
Developers may extend it at design time to describe application dependent
behavior. The extensions are automatically transferred to the runtime system. A
further focus of the paper is on the specification of temporal relations and
their extensibility in terms of model description and execution.

Model-based universal interaction devices are already capable to react on
contextual changes by automatically adapting the user interface, but without
considering the usefulness of the resulting user interface. Often tasks cannot
be executed any more or execution orders will result in dead locks caused by
unavailable functionality. We present our approach of investigating this
property of adapted models based on the example of the SmartMote in our living
lab the SmartFactory KL. Given the task description of the user
interaction we determine a dialog model in terms of a state machine -- which is
necessary in our process of user interface generation -- to determine possible
execution orders leading to the accept state of this state machine. Using these
execution orders the initial task model can be adapted, all misleading tasks
can be removed and the resulting user interface will only offer valid user
interactions.

In this paper, we propose a method for the analysis and the interpretation
of the interactions between the user and the interactive system to evaluate.
The proposed approach is based on the comparison between the user interaction
sequences and the sequences average. This confrontation concerns the task
execution duration, the realized tasks number and the action sequence used in a
defined experimental scenario.

Computer-based environments for supporting design are complex software
artifacts. These tools need to use sound computational formalisms as well as
address issues of human usability. The development of interactive and usable
generative systems is a significant research area in design computation. Though
classical search techniques play a central role in the generative kernels of
these "closed-world" systems, the open-ended exploration of design spaces is
the desirable goal. In this paper, we present a formal model of exploration
that combines search with user driven exploration. We describe the role of
interaction and agency in an experimental mixed-initiative design support
system.

Keywords: generative design; mixed-initiative; design exploration

Intertwined Modeling and Implementation of Interactive Systems Using HOPS

The paper investigates the co-evolution of models and implementations of
interactive systems within the model-based design paradigm. A view of
implementations as pure results of top-down model refinements is rejected. On
the one hand, models inform or even drive further design and implementation
steps. On the other hand, implementation ideas emerge during the iterative
development process. They can be evaluated and further explored by models. In
particular, selective modeling allows to focus attention on certain aspects of
the interaction.
Higher-Order Processes Specifications (HOPS) describe interactive systems
from different viewpoints and at different levels of granularity. The HOPS tool
is used to suggest techniques for intertwining modeling and implementation
activities. Object-oriented implementations in Java can be assigned to HOPS
models. Their animation results in model-guided proto typing open for both
empirical and analytical evaluation.

This paper introduces a pattern-based method for transformation of user
interfaces of interactive applications to diverse contexts of use. The method
is demonstrated with the help of various examples taken from existing software
solutions. The related pattern transformation rules are derived from the
samples and in turn expressed in a pattern format, the so-called transformation
patterns.

Design errors can suppose a unaffordable load for the production costs.
Allowing product designers to de ne behavioral patterns that describe the
interaction of future users of the system can reduce the number of design
errors. These patterns can be used to simulate how users respond to stimuli of
products detecting problems at early stages of product development.
Choreography systems to simulate the interaction among devices and services
defined using commercially available workflow engines have been used in
previous work (as the European project VAALID). However, the complexity of
human behavior models requires much more expressive workflow languages for
their definition.
In this work, a highly expressive Workflow engine is presented. This system
solves the problem of expressiveness in the representation of the interaction
of human behavior models in the VAALID project.

Building Multimodal Interfaces Out of Executable, Model-Based Interactors
and Mappings

Future interaction will be embedded into smart environments offering the
user to choose and to combine a heterogeneous set of interaction devices and
modalities based on his preferences realizing an ubiquitous and multimodal
access. We propose a model-based runtime environment (the MINT Framework) that
describes multimodal interaction by interactors and multimodal mappings. The
interactors are modeled by using state machines and describe user interface
elements for various modalities. Mappings combine these interactors with
interaction devices and support the definition of multimodal relations. We
prove our implementation by modeling a multimodal navigation supporting
pointing and hand gestures. We additionally present the flexibility of our
approach that supports modeling of common interaction paradigms such as
drag-and-drop as well.

The First Interaction Design Pattern Library for Internet of Things User
Created Applications

In this paper, we report our analysis of extracting relevant existing and
new interaction patterns that are candidates as enabling paradigms to
facilitate Internet of Thing user created application building. We first define
the context and underline what is an internet of thing user created application
and what are the main research issues. We stress the focus on Interaction
design as a must have paradigm to reach the Internet of thing user created
application vision and highlight the research scope. In this paper we
contribute with a template based interaction pattern that refers to competitive
advantages and limitations with regard to our vision. The research method
allowed us to sort out our first library of interaction pattern in this field.
We conclude the paper with lab experimentation and lessons learned.

Differentiating between Successful and Less Successful Products by Using
MAInEEAC -- A Model for Interaction Characterization

Today, the success of a software product is defined by a great user
experience caused by a well-defined interaction concept rather than features.
Therefore we present a new interaction model called MAInEEAC (Model for
Accurate Interaction Engineering, Enhancement, Alteration, and
Characterization) that is able to show what makes an interaction a great
experience and what are the elements of great human-computer-interaction.
Having evaluated the ways of entering an address with nine distinct navigation
systems, we present several findings which are crucial for making an
interaction successful. Thereby it becomes clear that a higher level of detail
is required in order to recognize important differences between single
interactions. MAInEEAC provides these details and can be seen as a further step
towards better understanding of human-computer-interaction.

Accessibility barriers exist on most websites and systems, making them
difficult to use for individuals with disabilities and other functional
limitations. Usable Accessible Design aims to design usable software that
addresses the potential needs of all users in the user-centered design process
with special consideration for users experiencing functional limitations. This
paper showcases how accessibility concerns affect us all and that a proper
definition of accessibility goes beyond individuals with disabilities. We then
identify existing accessibility standards and guidelines, and propose design
patterns as a proactive medium to capture and disseminate best accessibility
design practices. The patterns provide usable solutions to specific
accessibility problems, within a defined context, that take into account the
physical, cognitive and functional limitations of users. Finally we propose a
classification scheme for patterns based on usability principles and
accessibility heuristics.

From Structural Analysis to Scenarios and Patterns for Knowledge Sharing
Applications

In this paper we present a pragmatic development approach for knowledge
sharing applications that encompasses both design and software engineering
aspects. It starts from scenarios and leads to patterns that help application
developers and user interface designers on the one hand to separate relevant
content from unimportant data and on the other hand propose techniques for
qualitatively structuring knowledge management and knowledge sharing tasks for
enterprises and individuals.

Providing truly accessible user interfaces for a great variety of users
still presents a major challenge for software developers. Contrasting from a
'design for all' approach, we present a design patterns based approach for the
implementation of adaptive user interfaces for users with special needs. This
paper gives an overview of essential requirements of adaptive systems, covering
aspects for users as well as system developers. The overall structure, adaption
mechanisms, distinctive design pattern types and demonstrative examples of the
'MyUI' design patterns approach are described and illustrated.

There are several user interface specification models, each other covering
several design steps considered on a user interface representation. Two of
those steps are the composition and the presentation. This paper shows a study
about the steps that are covered by the most known techniques to represent
Graphical User Interfaces, focusing mainly in composition and presentation
steps. After this, an example of a game is made using DGAUI representation.
This game representation is useful to show the real problems when an
application is made from abstraction level to a prototype level. This example
is useful too as a possible reference system for testing between different
representation systems. The conclusion of this paper is that is possible to
make a real application with an abstract representation of user interface,
using visual simple components and make a prototype from user interface
representation.

Ubiquitous systems and interaction concepts are increasingly finding their
way into public systems like shopping malls, airports, public transport or
information kiosks. At the same time, these user interfaces also undergo
significant changes. Technologies like multi-touch systems or voice-based
interaction are now available to the general public and widely used. In
ubiquitous systems, these modalities are often combined, sometimes even
dynamically at runtime. This leads to new challenges for the conceptualization
and development of ubiquitous user interfaces in public systems, especially
where this implies adaptive behavior. We present contexts that possibly
influence the interaction with such public systems and describe ways of
modeling this interaction integrating context-adaptivity already in the
interaction models of public systems. Taking into account the context of the
public system and its users, we extend the concept of Interaction-Cases to
contain model aspects for different interaction contexts in public systems.

Model-based development of run-time adaptive user interfaces still poses a
complex problem since several models have to be specified and interlinked by
the developers. In this paper we present a first concept of a pattern driven
development methodology that addresses the reuse of user interface aspects. An
XML-based pattern notation is introduced that supports the specification of
patterns for different UI core models (room-based Use Model, Dialog Model and
Presentation). The pattern notation further separates the pattern interface
description from the used model fragments via a pattern interface
implementation. This enables the light-weight integration of a pattern
application process without touching the used core models' specifications.

This paper proposes a structure to increase the level of abstraction in
building visual user interfaces, establishing an initial set of features and
properties that a system for abstract complex components specification must
have. Two approaches of AIOs have been studied: Interactors and ADV. The study
was focused on the way in which these techniques manage interaction and
presentation of interface objects. In the following section an interface
complex component definition is proposed. In section 3.1 a basic set of
properties and features for interface complex components are showed. In the
last section an analogy between classes and objects in object-oriented
programming and interface complex components are presented.

One of the main indicators concerning the usability of an application is the
corresponding level of accessibility provided by this application. Although a
lot of work has been done in the software engineering domain, the accessibility
problem has not been enough tackled in the HCI area. In this paper we present
an idea to resolve the user-related accessibility problems since the modeling
stage of smart environment applications while being assisted by patterns. The
proposed idea is to provide two generic patterns used for any accessibility
modeling problem, and additionally the creation of two pattern libraries
presenting concrete solutions for the most common user-based accessibility
problems.

Cognitive, Psychological and Behavioural Issues in HCI

Empirical evidence suggests that users often exhibit a viewing pattern that
favors the top and left sides of web pages. This viewing pattern may cause
users to miss a great deal of information. Grounded in the model of visual
hierarchy, this study examines the impact of visual complexity on how users
view a page. The results show that users' viewing pattern in our study was more
scattered than those reported in previous studies, which used pages with a
relatively less complex visual hierarchy. We also examined the impact of
browsing and information retrieval on viewing pattern. Such an investigation
can provide insight for the design of homepages that can effectively serve both
those who browse and those who retrieve information. The results also show that
eye tracker can serve as a valuable tool for designers to develop and test new
designs.

Air Traffic Control systems are a kind of service which allows controllers
from the ground to keep aircraft safely separated to avoid collisions. It is
important to use cognitive systems for the development of this type of critical
system. Systems should not only have high performance functions, but also have
better user friendly functions and accessibility. It can be said that we have
to analyze the functional elements in the work of systems design. To design
more reliable interfaces or training programs for the provision of ATC systems,
we need to understand the details of basic functions of air traffic
controller's tasks within the system. In this research, we discuss the analysis
of ATC tasks and modeling of the knowledge of air traffic controllers. And
then, we attempt to formalize the basic knowledge of controllers to help them
to have a good understanding of the knowledge structure and logical relations.

Individual Differences in Work Load While Doing Multitasking with a Computer

In the present study we examined the individual differences in work load
while doing high and low cognitive load multimodal (audive + tactile or visual
+ tactile) tasks. We found among other things that participants that are
characterized as having high information capacity had lower levels of work load
and shorter reactions times during easy and difficult multitask as compared to
participant that are characterized as having lower level of information
processing capacity.

This chapter introduces a relationship between Internet anxiety and human
behavior. The Internet has become an avenue for service provision, third-party
applications, connectivity and social media. Thus, a clear understanding and
comprehensive description of the relationship between Internet anxiety and
human behavior becomes essential. The objective of this paper is to provide an
assessment of the behavior and anxiety patterns of different age groups on the
Internet. The study contributes to knowledge on human behavior and Internet
anxiety. The preliminary investigation was realized with a small number of
participants using qualitative research methodologies, including a structured
themed interview. The result indicates that participants felt more anxiousness
on Internet time delay anxiety, Experience anxiety, and Net Search anxiety.

In this paper, we propose a novel agent-based simulation modeling of human
behaviors. A conceptual framework of human behavioral simulation is suggested
using the ecological definition of affordances in order to mimic
perception-based human actions interacting with the environment. A simulation
example of a 'warehouse fire evacuation' is illustrated to demonstrate the
applicability of the proposed framework. The perception-based human behaviors
and planning algorithms are adapted and embedded within human agent models
using the Static and Dynamic Floor Field Indicators, which represent the
evacuee's prior knowledge of the floor layout and perceivable information of
dynamic environmental changes, respectively. The proposed framework is expected
to capture the natural manners in which humans participate in systems and
enhance the simulation fidelity by incorporating cognitive intent into human
behavior simulations.

Metacognition is a broadly studied concept in cognitive science, educational
psychology and developmental psychology. Prior research on metacognition shows
that successful learning is often based on specific metacognitive activities
which have to be frequently monitored during learning [1]. An important
limitation in prior studies is that most experimental tasks were designed
within static environments. Only rarely have researchers investigated
metacognition during dynamic decision making. Therefore, the purpose of this
research is to investigate the significance of metacognition while training to
execute dynamic control tasks. Findings from this study demonstrate that the
experimental group which was provided more focused feedback had higher
situation awareness accuracy, relative to the groups which received relatively
less focused feedback or no feedback. In addition, results indicated that
metacognitive behaviors which were measured using subjective ratings of Pre and
Post Meta probes showed different patterns. Preliminary findings provides
evidence that enhanced metacognition has a significant impact on actual
situation awareness in dynamic control tasks. Detecting causes for these
changes is the next step of the research.

The basic objective of this paper is to make an extensive reference of a
combination of concepts and techniques coming from different research areas,
Psychology and Web personalization technologies, both of which focus upon the
user. It has been attempted to approach the theoretical considerations and
technological parameters that can provide the most comprehensive user profile,
under a common filtering element, supporting the provision of the most apt and
optimized user-centered web-based result. It further underpins the significance
of the comprehensive user profile that incorporates not only the traditional
user characteristics, but other intrinsic values of the user such as user
psychological preferences (affect, personality and emotional processing
parameters). Eventually, this paper introduces our first experimental results
that concern the concept of personality and its effect on decision making and
problem solving user profiles.

The main objective of this research was to develop a methodology based on
Drury's [1] intermittent illumination model to directly measure individuals'
corrective reaction times, without the two methodology-related issues of Lin
& Drury [2]. Six highly-practiced participants performed self-paced
circular tracking tasks by using a modified LED monitor in a darkened room.
While performing movements, the monitor's backlight was intermittently turned
on and off to generate five values of expected delay of visual feedback.
Expected delay and measured speed were used with the intermittent illumination
model to calculate individuals' corrective reaction times. The results of
showed that the model fitted the data very well, accounts for at least 94.6% of
the variance. The mean corrective reaction time was 273 milliseconds and ranged
from 170 to 460 milliseconds for individual participants. While previous
studies only reported group means, this was the first study to report
individuals' corrective reaction times.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are systems which can provide people
affected by severe neuromuscular diseases with a new and easy way to
communicate with the world. The aim of this study is to use a new
administration method based on BCI technology to assess cognitive ability in
disabled people. The protocol was applied on 15 subjects who can't or have
difficult using traditional paper based test. The method, based on a SSVEP BCI
system, was previously validated on 20 healthy subjects. The previous
validation and the test results on disabled patient show the reliability of BCI
in administering cognitive test; BCI doesn't affect results but adds further
data that can be used to analyze other cognitive tasks in addition to those
measured by the test.

The proposed research developed a noncompensatory policy capturing technique
to infer judgment rules (represented in disjunctive normal form) from available
human data. The rule induction algorithm employs multiobjective Genetic
Algorithm (GA) as its central search mechanism to enhance the induction and
classification process. The quality of the induced rule set is measured by two
criteria, fidelity (the degree to which the rule set reflects the judgment data
they have been extracted from) and compactness (the simplicity of the rule
set). An experimental study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of
the algorithm on a number of benchmark datasets.

A User-Friendly Tool for Detecting the Stress Level in a Person's Daily Life

Mental health care represents over a third of the cost of health care to all
EU nations and, in USA, it is estimated to be around the 2.5% of the gross
national product. Depression and Stress related disorders are the most common
mental illnesses. The European project OPTIMI will develop tools to make
predictions through the early identification on the onset of the disease. In
this paper, we present a user-friendly application developed in the OPTIMI
project to detect the stress level in a person's daily life. The results of a
first usability study of this application are also presented.

Mobile devices and visual-spatial presentations of information are
pervasive, especially for tasks in which the mobile device can be moved to
close proximity of the task. This mobility allows the user to offload mental
workload by allowing physical transformations of the device. In this study, we
compared a fixed mobile device, a non-fixed mobile device, and a fixed desktop
display to determine the effects imposed by the mental workload of transforming
the frames of reference into alignment. Our results indicate that allowing the
user to manipulate the device's position can influence performance by reducing
the need for mental transformations.

Keywords: Mobile Device; Usability; 3D Models; Frames of Reference

Development Methods, Algorithms, Tools and Environments

A Middleware Architecture for Designing TV-Based Adapted Applications for
the Elderly

The elderly are beginning to use more and more new technologies, although
several times they find these are difficult to interact with, especially when
they are accessed by a keyboard or the screen is too small.
This work proposes a middleware architecture for TV-based applications for
the elderly, with a focus on social interaction services like webmail. The
elderly feel very confident with their TVs since it is something they use on a
daily basis, and the screen is sufficiently large. The architecture contains a
Context Manager with an Ontology that models the elderly user impairments and
actual context information collected from sensors located at the user's home,
and an Interface Adaptation Engine which generates the adapted interface for a
particular user, according to his profile and context of use. This architecture
is part of an ongoing EU funded project: MyUI and a first prototype is expected
by mid 2011.

Recently the need for extreme scale computing solutions presents demands for
powerful and easy to use performance visualization tools. This paper presents a
review of existing research on performance visualization for large-scale
systems. A general approach to performance visualization is introduced in
relation to performance analysis, and issues that need to be addressed
throughout the performance visualization process are summarized. Then
visualization techniques from 21 performance visualization systems are reviewed
and discussed, with the hope of shedding light on the design of visualization
tools for ultra-large systems.

In recent years, microblogging is popular among people and informal
communication becomes important in various communities. Therefore, a number of
Web communication tools are developed to facilitate informal communication. In
this paper, focusing on microblogging service, Twitter, we develop a user
recommendation engine which extracts latent topics of users based on
followings, lists, mentions and RTs. This recommendation algorithm is based on
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and KL divergence between two users' latent
topics. This algorithm hypothesizes that the users have latent connection if
the distance calculated by KL divergence is short. Additionally, we performed
an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithm, and this showed
that there is correlation between the distance and user's preference obtained
through questionnaire.

Usability evaluation (UE) methods may have several purposes: identify and
diagnose usability problems; evaluate the implementation, comparing the one
under evaluation with other systems, and also perform acceptance test. These
methods are usually expensive, time-consuming and complex. In this context, the
ErgoCoIn 1.0 has being used as an accessible system that can be used by several
people all over the world, even if they are not usability experts or
evaluators. This paper aims to present a new version of this environment
considering that its basic objective is to propose a higher quality for the
questions. Additionally, a new presentation questionnaire window small enough
to be used both in web browsers and mobile devices is proposed.

One key issue of both Information Visualization as well as Adaptive User
Interfaces is information overload. While both disciplines have already devised
well performing algorithms, methods and applications, a real merging has not
taken place yet. Only a few attempts bring the surplus values of both
disciplines together, whereas a fine-grained investigation of visualization
parameterization is not investigated. Today's systems focus either on the
adaptation of visualization types or the parameterization of visualizations.
This paper presents a reference Model for Adaptive Visualization Systems (MAVS)
that allows the adaptation of both the visualization type and the visualization
parameterization. Based on this model, a framework for the adaptive
visualization of semantics data will be derived. A use case describing the
interaction with an "adaptive visualization cockpit" covering different
visualization metaphors concludes the paper.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating a melody from a
generative probabilistic model by using Gibbs sampler. Furthermore, users can
modify the composed music by interacting with the generation process. This
method enables users to create their favorable melodies. Recently, music
composition using computer software is gathering attentions. Many people want
to compose their original music. However, musical composition is still too
difficult for beginners to obtain their favorable original music. Our system
highly supports such people easy to create own music. We also evaluate the
probabilistic music composition method by several experiments.

In this paper we introduce the notion of a Virtual User Lab that employs
virtual reality tools to simulate End-Users in realistic application scenarios
in order to help industrial designers and application developers to create and
test adaptive interfaces that evolve as users' preferences and potential
handicaps are discovered. We describe key elements of the VUL, discuss computer
vision-based algorithms for facial information processing to understand user
behavior and present an email-reading scenario to better highlight the system's
adaptive capabilities and practical usability.

Interactive tabletop has shown great potential in facilitating face-to-face
collaboration in recent years. Yet, in spite of much promising research, one
important area that remains largely unexplored is the windowing system on
tabletop, which can enable users to work with multiple independent or
collaborative applications simultaneously. As a consequence, investigation of
many scenarios such as conferencing and planning has been rather limited. To
address this limitation, we present uPlatform, a multi-user windowing system
specifically created for interactive tabletop. It is built based on three
components: 1) an input manager for processing concurrent multi-modal inputs;
2) a window manager for controlling multi-user policies; 3) a hierarchical
structure for organizing multi-task windows. All three components allow to be
customized through a simple, flexible API. Based on uPlatform, three systems,
uMeeting, uHome and uDining are implemented, which demonstrate its efficiency
in building multi-user windowing systems on interactive tabletop.

Keywords: tabletop; multi-user; windowing system; window management

Synchronization and Fluctuation of Rhythm in Musical Cooperative Performance

A live musical performance gives us better impression than recorded music
heard from a portable music player. From player's point of view, live
performance also gives better impression than playing music with metronome or
recorded music. Thus, the difference exists between the live musical
performance and the recorded performance that doesn't change in real time. In
this research, to clarify the difference, the cooperative performance of the
drum and the bass was analyzed from a rhythmical aspect. The results showed
that synchronization error between musical rhythms, and fluctuation of musical
rhythm became smaller in cooperated performance than in the performance with
recorded music.

Most of the state-of-the-art speech recognition systems use Hidden Markov
Models as an acoustic model, since there is a powerful Expectation-Maximization
algorithm for its training. One of the important components of the continuous
HMM we focus on is an emission probability which can be approximated by the
weighted sum of Gaussians. Although, EM is a very fast iterative algorithm it
can only guarantee a convergence to a local result. Therefore, the
initialization process determines the final result. We suggested here two
modifications of genetic algorithms for the initialization of EM. They are
compared to the results of the EM with the same number of local multi-starts.

Image Processing and Retrieval in HCI

The paper presents a system for human action recognition using contour based
shape representation. With the rapid progress of computing and communication
technology smart user computer interfaces are becoming most widespread. A major
goal is to go further than traditional human computer interaction (like mouse
or keyboard) and to find more natural means of interaction with computers,
including the application of computer games and surveillance. The objective of
this work is to achieve representation eigenspace for modeling and classifying
actions performed by individuals. Eigenspace is the subspace for each type of
action. A representation eigenspace approach based on the Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) algorithm is used to train the classifier. Behaviors are
classified with respect to a predefined set of learning actions. The key points
of this approach include the mode silhouettes are extracted from video, the
kind of shape descriptor used, the development of the new eigenspace and the
kind of classification used. Performance of the system is expressed in terms of
percentage of right or wrong classifications.

A novel relevance feedback scheme utilizing dynamic queries for content
based image retrieval systems is proposed, where the retrieval results are
updated instantly based on the user's feedback. The user is expected to label
at least one image as positive or negative, revealing the gist of the expected
retrieval results. Then the retrieval results are updated dynamically, without
any further user interaction, based on the similarity of the query and the
selected image in different feature spaces increasing the semantic accuracy of
the retrieval. The proposed method not only invalidates the drawbacks of
current relevance feedback systems in terms of user experience, but also
provides an innovative stand point for the relevance feedback scheme as well.

This paper presents a multivariate output regression based method to
synthesize face sketches from photos. The training photos and sketches are
divided into small image patches. For each pairs of photo patch and its
corresponding sketch patch in training data, a local regression model is built
by multivariate output regression methods such as kernel ridge regression and
relevance vector machine (RVM). Compared with commonly used single-output
regression, multivariate output regression can enforce the synthesized sketch
patches with structure constraints. Experiments are given to show the validity
and effectiveness of the approach.

Semantic image annotation can be viewed as a mapping procedure from image
features to semantic labels, by the steps of image feature extraction and
image-semantic mapping. The features can be low-level visual features, such as
color, texture, shape, etc., and the semantic labels can be related to the
knowledge of human on the image understanding. However, these linear
representations are insufficient to describe the complex natural scene. In this
paper, we study currently existing visual models that are able to imitate the
way the human visual system acts for the tasks of object recognition and scene
interpretation. Therefore, it is expected to bring a better understanding to
the image visual content in human cortex will. In the experiments, there are
three state-of-the-art visual models are investigated for the application of
automatic image annotation. The results demonstrate that with our proposed
strategy, the annotation accuracy is improved comparing to the most used
low-level linear representation features.

In recent years researchers have developed many graph theory based
algorithms for image segmentation. However, previous approaches usually require
trimaps as input, or consume intolerably long time to get the final results,
and most of them just consider the color information. In this paper we proposed
a fast object extraction method. First it combines deformable models
information with explicit edge information in a graph cuts optimization
framework. we segment the input image roughly into two regions: foreground and
background. After that, we estimate the opacity values for the pixels nearby
the foreground/background border using belief propagation (BP). Third, we
introduce the texture information by building TCP images' co-occurrence
matrices. Experiments show that our method is efficient especially for TCP
images.

Skeletonization is a transformation of an object in a digital image into a
simplified representation of the original object. The skeleton of an image
object is an abstraction of the original object which largely preserves the
extent and connectivity of the original region while throwing away most of the
boundary and interior pixels. In this paper, we propose a new method to
calculate skeleton from 3D space instead of image space which has only two
dimensions. Our method start with a contour of an object in an image, then
inflate this two dimensional shape to a three dimensional mesh, and then apply
a 3D mesh curve skeleton extraction algorithm to this intermediate three
dimension mesh model. Finally, we project the resulting 3D curve skeleton back
to image space and get the skeleton of the original shape or object in the
image. Our method is noise insensitive. A little perturbation on shape would
not change the structure of the resulting skeleton. Our method is relatively
fast because it only generates a geometry mesh in contrast to compute a Voronoi
graph. Our method preserves the topology as well as the shape.

Since there are many ampoule injection medicines, it is important to make
their labels easily distinguishable because confusing labels may lead to fatal
accidents caused by administering the wrong medicine by mistake. In this paper,
we utilize Fourier series expansion and wavelet transformation to extract the
characteristics in labels and propose an index to measure similarity that we
feel toward ampoule labels to prevent confusion in label designs. We also
discuss a way of parameterizing colors.

In this paper, a novel parallel data clustering algorithm based on
artificial immune network aiNet is proposed to improve its efficiency. In
consideration of the restrictions of GPU, we carefully designed the data
structure, algorithm flow and memory allocation strategy of the parallel
algorithm and realized it using NVIDIA's CUDA framework. During the
implementation, in order to fully explore its implicit parallelism, we
allocated threads on GPU that represent the network cells of aiNet, and
modified this algorithm to let those thread operations parallel during the
clustering process. We calculated the affinity parallel, combined the random
numbers with the local search algorithm to select the first n cell parallel,
and did the network suppression parallel. Experimental results show that
certain speedup can be obtained by using the proposed method.

Keywords: artificial immune network; aiNet; clustering; parallel; GPU

A Detection Method of Basic Mouth Shapes from Japanese Utterance Images

Some distinctive mouth shapes are formed when Japanese words and phrases are
uttered. Because people who have acquired a skill of Japanese lip-reading know
these characteristics, they can read lips movement. To realize the machine
lip-reading, we propose a method which detects the distinctive mouth shapes
from Japanese-speaking images based on their techniques. We define six mouth
shapes as the distinctive mouth shapes, and the mouth shape images are used as
template images. To detect the mouth shapes in utterance images, template
matching is applied. Waveforms of similarity which are calculated by the
template matching show some characteristic forms. Thus, we detect the mouth
shapes from the waveforms. We carry out some experiments using Japanese words,
and confirm effectiveness of the proposed method from the results.

Keywords: Lip-reading; Japanese phoneme; Template matching

Improving the Usability of Hierarchical Representations for Interactively
Labeling Large Image Data Sets

Image recognition systems require large image data sets for the training
process. The annotation of such data sets through users requires a lot of time
and effort, and thereby presents the bottleneck in the development of
recognition systems. In order to simplify the creation of image recognition
systems it is necessary to develop interaction concepts for optimizing the
usability of labeling systems. Semi-automatic approaches are capable of solving
the labeling task by clustering the image data unsupervised and presenting this
ordered set to a user for manual labeling. A labeling interface based on
self-organizing maps (SOM) was developed and its usability was investigated in
an extensive user study with 24 participants. The evaluation showed that
SOM-based visualizations are suitable for speeding up the labeling process and
simplifying the task for users. Based on the results of the user study, further
concepts were developed to improve the usability.

The similarity of drug names in Japanese such as
'アマリール' (Amaryl) and
'アルマール' (Almarl) causes confusion over drug
names and can lead to medical errors. In order to prevent such errors, methods
of computing their similarity have been proposed. However, there are no studies
that take account of character shape similarity quantitatively. In a previous
study, we calculated the character shape similarity by template matching
technique and proposed a method of measuring medicine name similarity based on
it. Although we obtained a high correlation coefficient between the medicine
name similarity values and subjective evaluation, we observed some character
pairs that are not similar. In this study, we improved the method of computing
the character shape similarity based on the characteristic points of character
and compared it with advanced methods.

Many areas of research have applied memory aid applications to help users
remember experiences or enhance learning abilities. Relatively little study
however has been done on the use of color based image code as a memory aid. In
fact much of what is in use by mainstream media and businesses use mobile
barcodes such as 2D image code like Quick Response (QR) code and Microsoft Tag
for accessing online content. Part of the freedom of using mobile code is many
formats are freely based image code and have accessible API and development
kits. Only few are licensed based and are limited to developing usable
applications. We investigate a proprietary licensed color based image code
using an application we developed called ColoriT (pronounced Color-ət) in
hopes of studying its applicability to enhance memory aid when viewing photo
artifacts. ColoriT is a simple photo memory tagging concept used to tag offline
photos in a pervasive and natural way. By enhancing the user's ability to tag
offline photos with memory artifacts we create a tool inspired by storytelling
to improve memory aid and overall enjoyment of looking at photos.

Image collections are growing at an exponential rate due to the wide
availability of inexpensive digital cameras and storage. Current browsers
organize photos mostly chronologically, or according to manual tags. For very
large collections acquired over several years it can be difficult to locate a
particular set of images -- even for the owner. Although our visual memory is
powerful, it is not always easy to recall all of one's images. Moreover, it can
be very time consuming to find particular images in other peoples image
collections. This paper presents a prototype image browser and a plug-in
pattern that allows classifiers to be implemented and easily integrated with
the image browser such that the user can control the characteristics of the
images that are browsed and irrelevant photos are filtered out. The filters can
both be content based and based on meta-information. The current version is
only employs meta-information which means that large image collections can be
indexed efficiently.

By spreading of smart phones, mobile barcodes are used widely. However,
there are so many 2D barcodes to be available. So, it is important to compare
those mobile barcodes. In this paper we performed decoding performance
comparison between popular mobile barcodes. ColorCode is using color
information to get information. So it shows most improved performance in
distance and size. Also, it can provide magnifying decoding mode, and it shows
more enhancing result.

Keywords: 2D Barcode; Image based Code

A Global Optimal Algorithm for Camera Calibration with One-Dimensional
Objects

The emergent one-dimensional (1D) calibration is very suitable for
multi-camera calibration. However its accuracy is not satisfactory.
Conventional optimal algorithms, such as bundle adjustment, do not perform well
for the non-convex optimization of 1D calibration. In this paper, a practical
optimal algorithm for camera calibration with 1D objects using branch and bound
framework is presented. To obtain the optimal solution which can provide
ε-optimality, tight convex relaxations of the objective functions are
constructed and minimized in a branch and bound optimization framework.
Experiments prove the validity of the proposed method.

The Least Squares Conformal Maps (LSCM) is an approximation of the conformal
mapping in the least-squares sense, and it can map the corresponding feature
points on two 3D surfaces into the same 2D location. This paper proposes a
non-rigid registration method for craniofacial surfaces based on LSCM
parameterization. Firstly, craniofacial surfaces are normalized in pose and
scale by using a unified coordinate system. Secondly, by pinning six landmarks,
which include the outer corners of the eyes, two corners of the mouth, two side
points of the nose wing, each craniofacial surface is mapped into a nearly
equal 2D domain by using LSCM. Finally, an iso-parameter mesh of each
craniofacial surface can be obtained by 2D to 3D mapping, which establishes a
unique correspondence among different craniofacial surfaces. To evaluate the
proposed method, the target surface is deformed into the reference surface
using TPS algorithm with dense correspondences being control points, and then
the sum of the distance between two correspondence point sets are computed, and
vice versa. According to the average distance, the proposed method is compared
with ICP and a TPS based method. The comparison shows that the proposed
approach is more accurate and effective.

Although many upsampling methods have been proposed, but no method can get
result images with satisfactory quality in real-time. In this paper, we propose
a CUDA based image upsampling algorithm, which can generate sharp edges with
reduced grid-related artifacts efficiently. By analyzing existing method, we
find chock points which confine the efficiency of the algorithm mostly and use
CUDA to accelerate our algorithm and improve the implementation model of the
algorithm. In this way we not only guarantee the quality of the result image,
but also realize the purpose of a real-time human-computer interaction.
Experimental results show that our method can get high-quality upsampled images
efficiently.

In this paper, we present a cubic polynomial model for fisheye camera by
using the lifting strategy, which point coordinates in low dimensional space is
lifted to a vector in high dimensional space. In contrast to the lifting
strategies reported, our lifting strategy is to let 3D point coordinates appear
in higher order polynomials. This paper displays that the cubic polynomial
model can effectively express the fisheye image points as the cubic polynomial
of world coordinates. Thus this allows a linear algorithm to estimate the
nonlinear models, and in particular offers a simple solution to estimate the
nonlinear between 3D point and its corresponding fisheye image points.
Experimental results with synthetic data and real fisheye images show that the
fisheye camera is modeled approximately through the cubic polynomial.